Ceramics are the first creation of civilisation to which man has added to nature. When he realised that by baking raw clay it retained its shape, ceramic vessels became indispensable in the preparation of food and they are the most common find in prehistoric settlements. With their characteristic form and decoration ceramics give recognisability to […]
At Vučedol the somewhat separated plateau Gradac was the metal-working and cultic center of the settlement. The Vučedol Culture inherited technological experience in metallurgy from the Baden Culture, which had used a mixed copper ore containing large quantities of arsenic and, more rarely, antimony. The natural combination of copper and arsenic yields arsenical bronze, an […]
The wide range of tools found shows the needs of the Vučedol Culture to improve herding, agriculture, hunting and fishing, weaving, making leather shoes and clothing, and pottery. Apart from handstones and millstones, there are many whetstones; stone axes with holes for handles; chisels; and mallets. Many chipped flint nuclei and their chips, or microliths, […]
Many preserved ceramic figurines depicting women let us reconstruct with precision the Vučedol Culture’s clothing. Clothes were made of leather, fur, wool, and linen, and dyed with plant dyes. Fabrics were woven on vertical looms, as shown by finds of clay loom-weights. Each thread at the bottom of the loom was tied to a ceramic […]
Vučedolians lived in a type of house with no earlier model, constructed like a large basket. The whole construction apart from the roof used branches – generally up to 5 cm thick – which were driven into the earth in rows every 25 to 30 cm. Wicker was woven into them horizontally. To keep the […]
Traces of the life of the Vučedol Culture layer can be followed on raised locations in lowlands, on exposed positions near thoroughfares, in hilly and mountainous regions, and in swamps and caves. On loess surfaces Vučedolians chose sites for settlements at the edges of steep ridges along rivers, and modified the other slopes near the […]
Vučedol residents supplemented their basic nutritional input from herding by hunting varying quantities of game animals. Deer and wild boar were most commonly taken. Hunting was easiest at the edges of swamps and forests since one could approach the animals with a bow and arrow or a spear. Refuse pits also contain bones from birds, […]
Besides its well-developed herding, the Vučedol Culture planted crops. Most frequent were emmer wheat, Einkorn wheat, and barley. The earth was worked with plows made of deer or cattle horns, and grain was ground with a handstone against a millstone. Representations of millstones and the work with them are known from Ancient Egyptian drawings and […]
In the whole Danube region, no period in prehistory has left as many animal bones in waste pits as has the Vučedol Culture. The culture had herding as its main occupation. Bones of domestic animals dominate, particularly cattle. The presence in their food, even if slight, of horses, which had come to the Danube with […]
The Baden Culture settled here in the mid-4th millennium B.C., arriving from the East along the loess terraces. Cohabitation of the new herding population with the older inhabitants of the area, mostly agriculturalists from the wider region, gradually led to new relationships and formed new cultures. The earliest finds of the Vučedol Culture are mostly […]